Word: kiloton
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...underground explosions. "Very few things in science are impossible," said he. "but I do not believe that there is any great likelihood that even in four or five years from now there will be a really foolproof method of checking underground explosions down to, let us say, one kiloton [1,000 tons of TNT]. No matter how we proceed we cannot eliminate nuclear explosions of the tactical weapons size and perhaps not even some which can. serve as useful models for bigger explosions...
Physicist Albert Latter, one of the U.S. scientific delegates to the Geneva conference, explained how a 300-kiloton explosion could be so placed in a big hole that it would give off a seismographic reading of only one kiloton...
...Underground tests of much less than 19 kilotons could be carried out with slight risk of detection. And by going to a lot of expense, the U.S.S.R. could carry out tests much bigger than 19 kilotons without much risk. Under the "big-hole" theory worked out by U.S. scientists, an explosion in a very large, spherical underground chamber would be muffled by a factor of as much as 300 to 1, so that a 100-kiloton explosion would set up no stronger a tremor than an unmuffled one-third kiloton explosion, and would thus go entirely undetected. Excavating...
...kiloton is the equivalent in blast of 1,000 tons of TNT. The bomb that wrecked Hiroshima measured about 20 kilotons. In the strange vocabulary of nuclear weapons, a one-kiloton weapon is considered "small." A megaton is 1,000 kilotons, or the equivalent of 1,000,000 tons...
...residence of France's Presidents. On the other end of the line was Soviet Ambassador to France Sergei Vinogradov with the news that France had just exploded in the Sahara its second atomic bomb-a small one, roughly the size of the U.S.'s Hiroshima bomb (20 kilotons), but far closer to being a portable, functional weapon than the first 60-to 70-kiloton French bomb...